Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
People are tempted to politicize the fact that I paint black figures, and the complexity of this is an essential part of the work. But my starting point is always the language of painting itself and how that relates to the subject matter.
You cannot just be working in a vast, air-conditioned loft space and think you are going to make a decent painting. Francis Bacon had a special studio built, and he felt completely emasculated in there. I have to be somewhere comfortable.
When I work, I'm thinking in terms of purely visual effects and relations, and any verbal equivalent is something that comes afterwards. But it's inconceivable to me that I could experience things and not have them enter into my painting.
If a certain activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression, it may follow that taking up the painting materials and beginning work with them will act suggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higher state.
He greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his, and derived genuine pleasure from contemplating a painting, a statuette, a rare lace curtain - no matter what - after he had bought it and placed it among his household gods.
In the early Seventies, I bought a dilapidated hotel in north Stoke for about £100,000 and spent the same amount again renovating it, putting in a guitar-shaped swimming pool, painting the bathrooms purple, and installing gold dolphin taps.
Overall, the anarchy was the most creative of all periods of Japanese culture for in it there appeared the greatest landscape painting, the culmination of the skill of landscape gardening and the arts of flower arrangement, and the No drama.
Do activities you're passionate about - which make your heart and soul feel perky - including things like working out, cooking, painting, writing, yoga, hiking, walking, swimming, being in nature, being around art, or reading inspiring books.
I was given an eight-foot painting on a luminous yellow background as a parting gift when leaving Paris in 2008. I did not dare take it with me to N.Y.C. and understood that the cost of shipping would have far outweighed the cost of the work.
Take the birds which you'll have noticed in so many of my recent paintings. I never thought them up, they just materialized of their own accord; they were born on the canvas... it is absurd to read any sort of symbolic significance into them.
Don't be too precious or attached to anything you write. Let things be malleable. For sketch writers, remember they're called sketches for a reason. They're not called oil paintings. Some of them are going to stink. You have to let them stink.
Art to me means lot of things - images and words. I may be no artist myself, but I recognise the pleasure you get from a new proverb or a new painting. It puts you in a particular frame of mind. Visually I like art, philosophically I like art.
Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
The photograph is the only picture that can truly convey information, even if it is technically faulty and the object can barely be identified. A painting of a murder is of no interest whatever; but a photograph of a murder fascinates everyone.
I begin painting and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself, under my brush. The form becomes a sign for a woman or a bird as I work... The first stage is free, unconscious... the second stage is carefully calculated.
In the 'Nude Descending a Staircase,' I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn't descending an equally real staircase.
Technically, a makeup artist's canvas is the face and body. The difference is that my painting of makeup is integrated into the painting of the flesh and not on top of it. I think in some ways it is more difficult to expressively deploy makeup.
When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don't know what I am doing. My work is far closer to the Informel than to any kind of 'realism'. The photograph has an abstraction of its own, which is not easy to see through.
When you talk about painters and you talk about painters painting masterpieces, there is no painter who painted only one painting and that was a masterpiece. You have to do a whole bunch of paintings to get to the place of mastering your craft.
The power of a painting has to come from the inside out, not the outside in. It's not just an image. It's an image with a body and that body has to contain its spirit...What's behind it decides everything. How it starts will define how it ends.
My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.
I trained as a painter, and I still love painting, but eventually I became aware that the physical aspect of painting didn't really suit me. I didn't enjoy working in the medium. It's very messy. I prefer to have it clean, with a nice computer.
I do remember when it occurred to me the first time, when I got the idea of painting the way I feel at a given moment. I was sitting in a chair and felt it pressing against me. I still have the drawings where I depicted the sensation of sitting.
I much prefer playing the bad guys. I think they are always the most interesting characters. I liken it to painting: if you're playing the good guy, you get three colors: red, white and blue. But if you're the bad guy, you get the whole palette.
There aren't really rules for painting, but there’s certain facts and fictions about painting. Part of what I do is document another surface and sort of translate it. They’re like translations, and then part of it is fiction, which is invention.
Art is nothing tangible. We cannot call a painting 'art' as the words 'artifact' and 'artificial' imply. The thing made is a work of art made by art, but not itself art. The art remains in the artist and is the knowledge by which things are made.
When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.
But I owe something to Vincent, and that is, in the consciousness of having been useful to him, the confirmation of my own original ideas about painting. And also, at difficult moments, the remembrance that one finds others unhappier than oneself.
You care enough, that you want your life to be fulfilled in a living way, not in a painting way, not in a writing way... you really do want it to be involving in living, corresponding with other living objects, moving, changing, that kind of thing.
True Boogie-Woogie I conceive as homogeneous in intention with mine in painting: destruction of melody, which is the equivalent of destruction of natural appearance, and construction through the continuous opposition of pure means - dynamic rhythm.
Painting was always something I thought I'd do once I retired. But then, about five or six years ago, a good mate passed away suddenly at the age of 50 and it made me realise that if I put off doing stuff until I retire, I might not ever get there.
The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is musical and architectural... Whether this visual relationship is slightly more or slightly less abstract is, for me, beside the point.
I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.
I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.
There is something that always will be true about painting and sculpture - that in order to really get it, you have to show up. That is something that is both sad and kind of beautiful about it. It remains analog. It remains special and irreducible.
Before a painter puts a brush to his canvas, he sees his picture mentally.... If you think of yourself in terms of a painting, what do you see?... Is the picture one you think worth painting?... You create yourself in the image you hold in your mind.
I have, and do sometimes, work with other media. But there is something about the physical activity and the directness of painting that I find fascinating. I am very attracted to the materiality of paintings and the visual phenomena of hue and value.
Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.
I think I tend to destroy the better paintings, or those that have been better to a certain extent. I try and take them further, and they lose all their qualities, and they lose everything. I think I would say that I destroy all the better paintings.
Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don't think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they're going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting.
You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.
You have to act and this is something that happened in abstract expressionism too, it was a discovery particularly in De Kooning's paintings, great paintings. There's a lot of speed in his work and the speed produces things that only speed can produce.
If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently.
Nothing's sacred anymore. Those girls and I got so close. They were painting me naked every day for months. It was kind of like going to a really bizarre sleepover. It's what you guys imagine we do: One naked girl and seven pairs of hands all over her.
When we did Cubist paintings, our intention was not to produce Cubist paintings but to express what was within us. No one laid down a course of action for us, and our friends the poets followed our endeavour attentively but they never dictated it to us.
Friends are discovered rather than made; there are people who are in their own nature friends, only they don't know each other; but certain things, like poetry, music, and paintings are like the Freemason's sign, they reveal the initiated to each other.
I'm a big believer in the emotion of design, and the message that's sent before somebody begins to read, before they get the rest of the information; what is the emotional response they get to the product, to the story, to the painting - whatever it is.
The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises. Herein, poetry differs from the other arts. Everyone does not practise music or painting or even dancing, but everyone without exception puts together words poetically every day of his life.
One of the interesting things I discovered is that in the late 19th century, painters actually had black-and-white copies made of their own paintings. They chose it even over photographs because they knew the photographic medium would distort their work.
The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.